Review  Perfect Dark
- Combat Simulator Introduction
- By Mike Schneider,
-by Andrew Weatherton
, 6.30.00
I have been a die-hard fan of Goldeneye's superb multiplayer
battles since my first experience with the game back in the summer of 1997.
It was the title that single-handedly invented social gaming in my mind. No other game had ever been able to pull four people together
in front of a television screen for an all night gaming party and leave every
one of them wanting more even as the sun rose.
Goldeneye's multiplayer mode was amazing; it pulled you into an arena
with three of your friends and sent you on a wild adventure.
You could split up into teams and trash talk one another as you chased
after them with a rocket launcher or, heaven forbid a KLOBB.
You would be clenching your teeth while scrambling for that body armor or
racing for the grenade launcher and quickly turn to blow up your friend who had
just stolen a kill from you. Goldeneye
was the Perfect multiplayer experience, and who could ever want more than that? The answer to that question of course is you, and most
importantly Rare. Rare was not
content with Goldeneye on a whole, they claimed that they could improve on the
game in every aspect. But could
they do it? That question would go
unanswered for the next three years, and those three years of waiting (and
playing Goldeneye) are over. Perfect
Dark is finally here, Rare's answer to their own masterpiece, Goldeneye, is now
available and it's our job to see whether or not Rare was telling the truth when
they said that they were merely getting their feet wet when they made Goldeneye.
This has lead to us building up expectations for the game that were so high that
it was virtually impossible for it to meet them.
But, I’m happy to say, Perfect Dark has done it, it has met nearly
every one of my hopes and desires. Rare
has delivered an extremely in-depth, and fun multiplayer mode that gives players
so many options it will make their heads spin.
In-fact, at first the shear number of menus can be a little overwhelming,
it takes quite a while to get used to the idea that you have the ability to
modify every single aspect of a multiplayer match.
This is a large hurdle to jump at first but will keep the game locked,
welded, and bolted into players N64s for years to come!
Never has a game, on any platform, offered this many options. The number of multiplayer modes possible is nearly
immeasurable, and this allows Perfect Dark to cater itself directly to the needs
of the gamers who choose how THEY want to play a game. It should be noted that there is a slight pause generated
whenever moving between menus due to the N64 having to refresh it’s full 8MB
of RAM. The pause is in no way
comparable to the loading time of the PlayStation or Dreamcast, but it can be an
annoyance at times. (This pause is
normally around a second to two seconds in length, but I have seen a pause as
long as five seconds).
Continue onto our expert analysis of the Challenges
Mode within Perfect Dark, on page 11...
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